“Then go,” I said.
Sloane nodded once, a short, sharp motion, before she whirled and ran down the hall like she was being chased. I’d only ever seen her move that way in the field, when she was trying to close in on a story that we were on the verge of losing contact with. The smell of apples seemed to get stronger in her wake. If we hadn’t ridden over in the same car, I would have suspected her of wearing some truly tasteless perfume.
Her flight took her past the first three doors in the hallway. When she reached the fourth door she pulled up short, vibrating like the bloodhound she had compared herself to. Now moving with all the caution and inevitability of one of Bluebeard’s wives, she reached for the doorknob. I swallowed the urge to shout at her, to tell her to step away from the door. This was her job. I led the team, but it was Sloane who ran into danger, time and again, setting off the traps before the rest of us could trigger them.
The door swung inward at her touch. True to her promise, Sloane stayed in the hall, remaining in full view as she looked at the contents of the room. Her face fell. Then she turned toward me, and with only a shred of her usual bravado, she said, “I don’t think this therapist is going to work out for me after all.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because dead men don’t actually help my mental health all that much.” She shrugged. “I’m funny that way.”
I closed my eyes and groaned.
#
Sloane and I sat on the front porch, waiting for the rest of the team to come and join us. The murder of crows had returned two and three at a time, apparently deciding that we weren’t a threat. Some of them were even perching on my car, watching us with calculating black eyes. As we didn’t seem inclined to feed them, they didn’t come any closer. Sloane wasn’t even throwing rocks at them. That worried me.
“Why did I smell apples in there?” I asked her. I wasn’t sure I actually wanted an answer, but I wanted her talking. Silence was very rarely a good thing where Sloane was concerned.
“Because in your story, blood is the smell of getting away, and death smells like apples,” she said, still watching the crows. “I was pretty sure there was a dead guy in there with us. The apples just sealed it.”
I frowned, not quite sure I understood what she meant. “So what did you—”
“Don’t ask me that, okay? I’m on my best behavior today, just like you asked me to be, and part of keeping me there is you not asking me that question.” Sloane didn’t look at me.
“Deal,” I said quietly. We sat in silence after that, just watching the crows, until a big black van came tearing around the corner. It was moving too fast for this kind of residential neighborhood, and it didn’t really slow down as it hurtled down the street, finally dumping all its speed as it screeched to a halt right behind my car.
“Oh, goodie, the clown car’s here,” deadpanned Sloane.
I shook my head. “Show-offs.”
The van doors opened, allowing Andy and Demi to spill out of the back. Jeff—who had apparently been driving—appeared around the hood, drawing quickly ahead of the others. The crows looked at him with disdain, but didn’t move even as he made a beeline across the lawn. “Are you all right? Is Dr. Reynard really dead? Did Sloane kill him?”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” said Sloane, sounding sincerely pleased. “No, I didn’t kill the geek. He was already dead when we got here. But I could have totally killed him if I’d needed to.”
“Don’t think that was meant to be a compliment, Agent Winters,” rumbled Andy as he followed Jeff’s trail through the grass. The crows did scatter in front of him, maybe because of the five of us, he was the only one with no direct connection to the narrative. “Most people would take the implication that they had killed their new therapists … poorly.”
“I’m not most people, asshole,” Sloane replied. There was no trace of rancor in her voice. “We got here, he was dead, we called you. Now here you are, and we can get down to the business of figuring out who ganked the man who was supposed to fix me.”
“I’m getting really tired of the dead bodies, you guys,” said Demi. “Can I wait outside?”
“Don’t worry, Agent Santos; this one is fresh,” I said, standing. “He hasn’t had time to decay.”
“But he will if we don’t get in there.” Sloane bounced back to her feet, looking more energized than I’d seen her since she stopped herself from killing Elise Walton. Maybe all it took to set her world back on track was an interesting murder.
It couldn’t be that easy—nothing ever really is—but it was nice to dream.
“Come on everyone,” I said. “Sloane’s going to show us to the dead man.” With that, I turned and followed her inside. The others trailed along behind me, even Demi, who was looking increasingly unhappy about being here—or rather, unhappier, since she hadn’t really seemed happy since she’d joined the team.
That was something to worry about later. Right now, I had a dead man and Sloane to worry about, and the two of them were quite enough.
Sloane took the hallway at a normal pace this time, walking past the three closed doors to what had been Dr. Reynard’s private office, where she stopped and beamed, looking as proud as a brand-new mother showing off her specially designed nursery. Since I’d already seen the good doctor, I hung back, allowing Jeff and Andy to go ahead of me into the room. Demi stayed behind me, and I didn’t force the issue. She was going to need to get used to dead bodies sooner or later. That didn’t mean it had to be today.
Dr. Reynard had been sitting at his desk, a large, ornately carved piece of oak furniture that was probably antique, when he’d been killed. It was unclear whether he’d had any opportunity to react to what was clearly a blitz attack: even without carefully investigating his body, I could see four distinct punctures in the fabric of his waistcoat. Those probably hadn’t killed him. The slashed throat was a much better candidate for cause of death.
Andy circled the desk, treading carefully as he avoided the inevitable blood spatter. “The knife’s back here on the floor,” he called. “Looks like a carving knife.”
“There’s a kitchen at the end of the hall,” said Sloane. “I bet you’ll find a bunch more knives just like it, when you get a chance to go and look.”
“What’s it look like, Andy?” I asked.
“Stainless steel, black handle, good edge,” he reported, crouching down to get a better look. “I can’t make out the manufacturer. There’s too much blood on the blade.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “Agent Santos, go check the kitchen and see if you can find the set this knife came from.”
“Alone?” she squeaked.
I turned, frowning at her. “You can go alone, or you can help us examine the crime scene in order to help free up more resources. Which sounds like more fun to you?”
“I’ll check the kitchen,” she half-whispered, before turning and fleeing down the hall.
“Amateurs,” I muttered, turning back to the office. Jeff was watching me, a concerned expression on his face. I frowned. “What?”
“You need to go easier on her,” he said. “She’s not adjusting as well as we might have hoped, and riding her isn’t going to make the process any smoother.”
“We’ve had a few too many dead bodies since she joined us,” I said. “Maybe if things had stayed slow, we could have gone easy on her, but as things stand, it’s all hands on deck until everything settles down.”
Jeff’s concerned look actually deepened. “Henry,” he said, speaking with the sort of exaggerated carefulness that I normally associated with people trying to talk to Sloane. “Doesn’t it seem strange to you that we’ve had more than a case a week since Demi joined us? I’m not saying that correlation equates to causation—she’s a Piper, there’s nothing in the Index about Pipers encouraging memetic incursions—but you can’t pretend we haven’t been encountering more stories recently. We need everyone to be operating at their best, yes. We also need ever
yone to stay well balanced and stable, or we’re going to start falling apart.”
I gaped at him for a moment before realizing that the office was far too silent. I turned to find Andy eyeing the two of us thoughtfully. “Mommy and Daddy are fighting,” he said, his deep bass voice lending the statement an air of ludicrousness that it really didn’t need.
“Think they’ll argue over who gets to keep us when they do the custody thing?” asked Sloane.
Andy snorted. “I think they’ll bribe each other to take us off their hands.”
I groaned. “All right, you two: your point is taken. I will try to be nicer to Demi, and Jeff and I will restrict our discussions of policy to a more private setting. Andy, you find anything else that might shed some light on what happened to our dead man?”
“He didn’t struggle,” said Andy. “I think his throat was slashed from behind, probably while he was going over Sloane’s file.”
“How did you reach that conclusion?” Sloane’s tone was dangerous.
Andy straightened, holding his hands out to her palms first. It was a placating gesture, and I wasn’t sure it was going to work, given the circumstances. “I’m not accusing you of anything, Sloane. Heck, if anything, you’re the only one of us who has an alibi, since you were with Henry when this man was killed. But you were his incoming patient, and look at the desk. Something was taken.”
Eyeing him suspiciously, Sloane moved forward until she could get a clear view of the bloodstains on Dr. Reynard’s desk blotter. “There was something here when he was cut,” she said, after a momentary study. “Andy’s right. It was the right size to be my personnel file. That doesn’t mean it was my personnel file, but the timing is suspicious.” She raised her head. “Is this my fault?” There was something heartbreaking and small about her voice. It made me want to hug her, even knowing that the gesture would probably result in my having two or three fewer fingers.
“No,” I said firmly. “If someone killed him over his work with the Bureau, this is just a case of bad timing. If it was something else, we’ll figure it out. We’ll fix this.”
“We can’t fix a bad case of being dead,” said Andy.
“Not without consequences, anyway,” added Jeff.
I shuddered.
Footsteps from the hall drew everyone’s attention. Demi reappeared, pale-faced but steady. “I found the knife block,” she said. “The knife was missing, just like you said.”
“Thank you, Agent Santos,” I said.
She took a deep breath. “There’s something else,” she said.
#
The back door had been left ajar, presumably when Dr. Reynard’s killer fled the scene. The now-ubiquitous crows, never content to leave an opportunity unexploited, had taken their chance to invade the kitchen. Most perched on the backs of the chairs pushed in at the small butcher block table, while one rested atop the fridge, ruffling its inky feathers and watching us with a judgmental avian eye.
“Did this guy feed these things or what?” asked Andy. “Jeff?”
“I’m assuming you’re using my name as shorthand for ‘is there any mention in the Index of crows associated with type one-oh-five,’ and the answer is no, there is no such mention,” said Jeff mildly. “If there were, I would have said ‘well, that’s interesting, this is a rare variant’ by now. As it stands, I’m as baffled by the never-ending supply of corvids as you are.”
“He must have fed them,” said Demi. “Crows are smart. They learn faces, and they know who’s nice to them. If Dr. Reynard worked to make friends with them, it only makes sense that they’d hang out at his house.”
Exposure to Dr. Reynard was exposure to the narrative, if not in the full-spectrum, blazing way that it would have been if he’d been active, and not in abeyance. Animals exposed to the narrative—especially animals exposed via a memetic incursion with animal echoes of its own—tend to start taking on the qualities we associate with “fairy tale” animals. Dogs get more loyal, sheep get a little less suicidal, and wolves turn into man-eaters. Whereas crows …
Crows have always had a reputation for being clever, clever birds.
“Henry?” Jeff touched my elbow. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that if I’m going to get the side effects of being what I am, I may as well get some of the advantages at the same time.” I reached up and pulled the ponytail holder out of my hair, taking advantage of the motion to shoot what I hoped would be a menacing glare at the rest of my team. “This is just a means of gathering information. None of you says a word about this, do you understand me?” I snapped the ponytail holder around my wrist.
Demi looked bemused. Andy looked displeased. And Sloane, of all people, looked approving. She nodded as my eyes met hers, and then gestured with her chin toward the nearest of the crows. It felt oddly like she was giving me permission. Somehow, I didn’t mind that. I also wasn’t sure I liked it.
I turned to the refrigerator, raising my eyes until I was looking at the big black bird perched on top of it. The crow ruffled its feathers and clacked its beak, but didn’t squawk or caw at me. I chose to take that as a good sign—that’s me, ever the optimist—and I held to it as I reached deep down into myself, finding the place where the snow never melted and where a man’s death could smell like apples. I didn’t close my eyes, but it still felt like I was opening them when I came back out of the cold, trailing the memory of it with me.
“Hello,” I said, to the crow. “You must be a friend of Dr. Reynard’s. We’re his friends too. We’re very upset because something bad has happened to him. You don’t know anything that might help us find the person who hurt him, do you?”
The rustle of wings from the kitchen behind me marked the movement of the other crows. From the sound of it, they were making their way closer, drawn in by the inexplicable fascination that all animals seem to have for the seven-oh-nines. I kept my eyes on the crow in front of me. He might not have been their leader before this moment, but he was now. He was being pulled into the story.
The crow clacked his beak, a small, sharp sound, like a maraca being snapped. Then he cawed, a low, rolling sound, something like a kazoo being played into a theremin.
I nodded. “Yes, the red-haired man.” I was bluffing—I had no idea what the crow had actually said, if anything—but it was an educated guess.
The crow gave another rolling caw before launching himself from the fridge and flying to land in front of the back door. He pushed it open with his head, looked back at me, and strutted calmly out onto the porch.
“That’s a ‘come on, stupid’ if I’ve ever seen one,” I said, and followed him. My team was close behind me, and the other crows brought up the rear, a moving wall of swirling black feathers and the sound of frantically beating wings. It should have made me nervous. Instead, it made the scene feel more like home.
The big crow continued to walk, hopping down the porch stairs one by one before striking out across the grass. We followed him to a small garden plot, and then past it, to a compost heap. The crow stopped and turned, looking up at me.
“Caw,” he said.
“This compost has been disturbed recently,” Jeff said.
“Of course it has,” said Andy, sounding resigned. “I guess I’ll go find a shovel.”
“Thank you, Andy,” I said. Turning my attention back to the crow, I added, “And thank you. I hope we’ll be able to avenge your friend.”
The crow cawed again, looking somehow expectant. I blinked.
“Uh …” I said.
“Scratch his neck,” said Sloane. “Birds like that.”
I decided not to ask how she knew that. Hopefully, if she was setting me up for a pecking, the crow would be too annoyed by the attempt to stick around and peck me twice. Bending forward, I hesitantly reached out and scratched the crow on the back of the neck, under the feathers. I was rewarded with a throaty purring noise that barely sounded like it had come out of a bird. Then he launched himself into the air, t
he tips of his flight feathers brushing my arm as he flew up to land on the roof with what looked like the rest of the murder. They all watched us, dozens of big black birds with judgmental eyes.
“… that was weird,” I said.
“I thought you didn’t like being a story,” said Demi. “Wasn’t that a story sort of thing to do?”
I stopped dead for a moment. Then, carefully, I said, “Yes, it was. But no one who isn’t a story can sneak up on a clever fox in his den, which means we’re looking for someone inside the Index. Sometimes that means I have to use tools I don’t like.”
“She’s a hypocrite like the rest of us,” said Andy, reappearing with a shovel in his hands. I hadn’t even seen him go. “Once you come to accept that, everything else will make a lot more sense around here.”
Sloane snorted. I glared. And Andy, having moved into position at the edge of the compost heap, started to dig.
It didn’t take long. Either our killer hadn’t expected us to check the compost pile, or they hadn’t cared about anything beyond slowing us down. His third shovelful of dirt exposed a pile of filthy manila folders. Some of them were dirtier than others, probably because they were also bloody, giving the soil something to cling to. Andy stepped back. I started to step forward.
Jeff grabbed my arm. “Stop,” he said.
I stopped. “What is it?”
“This was too easy,” he said. “It has to be a trap of some kind. Sloane? Can you check for contact poison?”
“Sure thing, shoemaker,” she said, recovering some of her usual swagger as she sauntered over to the compost pile and crouched down, assuming a position that only a praying mantis could love. She studied the folders for a moment, frowning, before leaning closer. Her frown deepened.
“Sloane?” I said.
“Gimme a second.” She flapped a hand in my direction before leaning closer still, looking utterly perplexed. “Jeff, wasn’t there a management discussion like ten years ago about adding—what’s it called—urban legends to the Index? Since they’re sort of like a new form of memetic incursion that’s been getting more codified with every repetition?”